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Swimming Holes:
“I tell you, we used to take the kids swimming over there in the little streams,” Alice says. “A lot of the people, after they did a lot of these things, they moved. They moved away because they close up, you know wen right across from St. Ann’s, before St. Ann’s anyway, now they took part of those people’s land away. They took the river and the farmers, they had no water to do, so a lot of them moved and then they get new people there now. All those houses that came up, we have new people living right there. “So for us we didn’t have, the water came after us. It didn’t go down our road. It went across in the back of what’s Haleiwa Joes now. It was Ha‘ikū Gardens, so it went behind there down to across there’s a stream that goes across. 
“We had our own big swimming hole. It’s still there but it’s between Kahekili and Ha‘ikū, mauka side. We used to swim in it but we swim by the lo‘i. Recently we had a hard time finding it. Somebody bought the property. We had fun time and Uncle Jerry said ‘Here’ and I said ‘No, way in the bushes.’ We had a house down where the lo‘i is now, there’s a regular house there now. A family lives there, I don’t know how he got that place. “The big pool there at Haleiwa Joes, we swim in the back. We swim in the back not in what they the pond now. Yeah with a little shack there. The owner wouldn’t let us go in there. We were in the back swimming. It was kind of a muddy. It was muddy there, and then on the backside there was another muddy spot where they kept the buffalo. There was a buffalo there, but the buffalo killed the owner. Quite some time back after, they killed him. You just saw it on a rampage one day. “But on the side where Club View and Ha‘ikū Garden, there’s a stream and a big, like a swimming pool. They have frogs, green frogs, the green ones, and we used to go catch them and sell. We used to go in the water, but you know you can catch something the best at night. The catch was the best at night, you go in there, but we used to like go. And now my kids, that was a playground for them. That was a playground. “My grandchildren all live different places. But my sister's kids still go. They go over there but not too much since Haleiwa Joes took over.” 
“My father used to take us down to Makawiliwili,” Rocky recalls. “It was a little pond with the waterfalls. We would go down there every Saturday and scrub our hair. The way he wanted to, and he’d play with us with the ginger, awapuhi. I used to hate that, but he took us all down in the waterfalls. Because under the waterfalls, not everybody knew there was a cave. "He taught me how to hide in there and how he can breathe, put our face against the side. In fact, I remember saving my cousin. She almost drowned there on it. One of my cousins pushed me off a cliff and I belly flopped there. I wanted to kill her.” “Just mauka of our ‘ili of Waipao,” Keoni says, “there’s an easement that Kapalikū and Rick bought. And that easement includes Ha‘akōlea, which is a pond that is also in our stories, connected with Papa and Wākea and some of their exploits. It’s a place that community continues to visit. It’s one of the reasons people are constantly moving across Waipao to access that area.” 
“Ha‘akolea has been here a long, long time,” Nick Needle says. We take care of the trail and area around Ha‘akolea so that it remains open and accessible. We take the kids up here to swim when they are done working. There are stories of this pond that ties it directly with Kameha‘ikana and connects ma uka to ma kai in this ahupua‘a. She would gather limu and crab from near the fish pond by Ke‘alohi, which is where He‘eia State Park is today, and she would bring it up here to eat the crab and the limu. And it was said that pōhuehue grew up here, which is the beach morning glory that’s normally just found by the beach.” “In the Hawaiian version,” Keoni goes on, “the story of Papa and Wākea mentions Ha‘akōlea and it mentions that it would be a place that once pāpa‘i—ocean crabs—and limu kala and pōhuehue used to flourish. There are so many reasons why different things are put into mo‘olelo. To me what that identifies at a minimum is high connectivity, mauka-makai. Whether there was literally those things there, quite possibly. But at least, on a systems level, I believe it identifies the connectivity between mauka-makai and the importance of that connectivity.” Here is a translation of the Hawaiian story: 
"Kamehaikana was a beautiful woman for this place, Iolekaa, in those days of old Hawaii. She was a supernatural woman. Her husband was Makea (Wakea). One day, she went to the sea of Kealohi to fish and came to Heeia-kea. She went down to the beach to catch crabs and gather sea weeds, Then she went up to Haakolea where there was a spring. There she washed the sea weeds and crabs. The crabs ran about and the sea weeds were found growing in the spring, said the ancients. The surplus piece of pohuehue vine which she wore about her was broken off and thrown down where she washed the sea weeds and crabs. The pohuehue vine grew at the edge of the spring." —“Ka Huakai Pokole; Koolauloa” Kuokoa, Aug. 28, 1896. Read it in Hawaiian “A lot of friends my age that grew up in Kāne‘ohe,” Nick Needle adds, “they would go swim Ha‘akolea when they were kids. Now when they visit here, they trip out because this area looked nothing like this back then, growing up in the 80s. They had no idea there was this property (Papahana Kualoa) here.” “One of the things that my mom was trying to help save,” says Keola Dalire, “was this ice pond that was right in that gully where they’re doing the expansion of Kahekili Highway. There was an ice pond back there before, and when they came for an environmental study or input, they came and interviewed my mother and she shared with them that there was an ice pond there. I don’t know how successful that wasn’t saving it, because not many people even knew it existed. 
"And when they started to build these roads and divert the water, they kind of disappeared. So a friend of mine actually lives back there and has said there they can tell where they’re used to be some kind of pond. Keola D. explains the term “ice pond”: “For most people going to the beach, especially in Hawai‘i, our waters are way warmer than in California or in Washington. So for us to go into that water, it’s pretty icy. We have underwater springs that are also fed by the fresh water. Sometimes the streams will go straight through these springs. And compared to the water we’re used to at the beach, it’s freezing. That’s what these underwater springs and the fresh rain runoff would tend to create. It was way colder than the beach water we’re used to. "So we started to call these ‘ice ponds’ and I believe there’s an even more famous one on the other side of the Likelike that people hike to, where they say it’s so chilly, it actually feels like its kind of icy. I don’t know, I never braved that one.” |
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